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Scrutinizing sciencebehind the scenes

Every issue, Science News delivers reports from the front lines of
science — the latest findings from
scientific journals, accounts of presentations at conferences, descriptions of events such as the Phoenix
Lander’s arrival on Mars. But reporting the news isn’t the only task of

science journalism. To put the news in perspective and
context, it’s important to go behind the scenes.

In this issue, freelance writer Regina Nuzzo explores
the backstage machinations underlying much of today’s
biomedical science news — the mathematical methods
used for analyzing studies of genes and disease. Over the
past couple of decades or so, thousands of scientific papers
have been published linking human diseases or other mal-adies to variants of specific human genes. In the preponderance of cases, those links turn out to be false. It seems
that, very often, the math is misleading.

That is not very surprising to anyone who truly understands the ins and outs of probability and statistics, the
branches of mathematics researchers rely on to draw
inferences from complicated data. There is never any absolute guarantee that a statistical inference will turn out to
be correct — just a likelihood. And standard methods are
really not very good at quantifying that likelihood. Often
statistical methods are improperly applied, and even when
the math is done correctly the results are frequently misinterpreted, even by the scientists themselves.

In her article, Regina (herself a trained statistician)
explores a relatively new approach that attempts to rectify
some of the problems with previous studies linking genes
to diseases. These “genome-wide association” studies
employ a multistep process for paring down the massive
amounts of data produced by genome studies, building in
internal replication to eliminate (well, reduce) the prospect of false links.

It’s certainly an advance over previous methods, which
were overmatched by the complexity and massiveness of
genomic data. But even the whole-genome approach has
its limits and pitfalls. Our report on it should serve not just
as a look behind the scenes at the methods that produce
the news, but also as a reminder that science news is often
flawed because it describes an imperfect process — science.
Shortcomings that reduce the reliability of science’s methods (and hence the news coverage of it) will be a topic for
future discussion in these pages. It is the case, after all, that
how scientists find out what they find out is sometimes as
important as what they (say they) find out.